Some server-deployed, web-based mail applications give users access to their centrally located mailboxes. These applications also provide the ability to send and receive electronic mail (email), schedule appointments, and perform other personal information management (PIM) tasks from a network such as the Internet. Some of these applications execute in a browser and are a companion to other PIM applications. Such client web applications require a great amount of client-server traffic to be able to implement the PIM functionality. For example, when a user refreshes a list of email in an inbox to check for new email, a web request is sent to the server to retrieve the new list of email in the inbox.
For some client applications, the client-server traffic is a mix of Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) extensions to the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and other various schemas (e.g., based on simplistic name-value pairs in HTTP POST requests). The use of multiple protocols for data access in these prior systems complicates the implementation and contributes to poor maintainability. These prior systems also use inconsistent and insufficient schema for the requests. The name-value format such as used in some prior systems is very limited and does not easily support strongly typed data or more complex structures or arrays. In addition, because the name-value format requires a line break as the separator for name-value pairs, all data for a particular name-value pair has to be encoded without a line break before transmission and then decoded upon receipt. These extra steps in some existing systems slow the processing and increase complexity. Yet another problem with some existing web client applications is that the server-side code providing various functionality to the client application is chaotic and disorganized. Adding new request handlers to the server-side code of the existing systems is difficult.
Accordingly, an improved system for client-server communication is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.